Trump Bows to Putin’s Approach on Ukraine: No Cease-Fire, Deadlines or Sanctions

 

News Analysis

Trump Bows to Putin’s Approach on Ukraine: No Cease-Fire, Deadlines or Sanctions

 

The net effect of the Alaska summit was to give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a free pass to continue his war against his neighbor indefinitely without further penalty, pending talks on a broader peace deal.

 

Peter Baker

By Peter Baker

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent and a former Moscow co-bureau chief for The Washington Post, reported from Anchorage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/us/politics/trump-putin-approach-ukraine.html

Aug. 16, 2025

 

On the flight to Alaska, President Trump declared that if he did not secure a cease-fire in Ukraine during talks with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, “I’m not going to be happy,” and there would be “severe consequences.”

 

Just hours later, he got back on Air Force One and departed Alaska without the cease-fire he deemed so critical. Yet he had imposed no consequences, and had pronounced himself so happy with how things went with Mr. Putin that he said “the meeting was a 10.”

 

Even in the annals of Mr. Trump’s erratic presidency, the Anchorage meeting with Mr. Putin now stands out as a reversal of historic proportions. Mr. Trump abandoned the main goal he brought to his subarctic summit and, as he revealed on Saturday, would no longer even pursue an immediate cease-fire. Instead, he bowed to Mr. Putin’s preferred approach of negotiating a broader peace agreement requiring Ukraine to give up territory.

 

The net effect was to give Mr. Putin a free pass to continue his war against his neighbor indefinitely without further penalty, pending time-consuming negotiations for a more sweeping deal that appears elusive at best. Instead of a halt to the slaughter — “I’m in this to stop the killing,” Mr. Trump had said on the way to Alaska — the president left Anchorage with pictures of him and Mr. Putin joshing on a red carpet and in the presidential limousine known as the Beast.

 

“He got played again,” said Ivo Daalder, who was ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama. “For all the promises of a cease-fire, of severe economic consequences, of being disappointed, it took two minutes on the red carpet and 10 minutes in the Beast for Putin to play Trump again. What a sad spectacle.”

 

Mr. Trump’s allies focused on his plans to convene a three-way meeting with Mr. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. “Let me tell you, I’ve never been more hopeful this war can end honorably and justly than I am right now,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a leading hawk on the Ukraine war, said on Fox News Friday night.

 

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The cease-fire that Mr. Trump gave up in Alaska had been so important to him last month that he threatened tough new economic sanctions if Russia did not pause the war within 50 days. Then he moved the deadline up to last Friday. Now there is no cease-fire, no deadline and no sanctions plan.

 

Mr. Trump, characteristically, declared victory nonetheless, deeming the meeting “a great and very successful day in Alaska.” After calling Mr. Zelensky and European leaders from Air Force One on the way back to Washington, Mr. Trump said he would now try to broker the more comprehensive peace agreement Mr. Putin has sought.

 

“It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up,” he wrote on social media on Saturday.

 

He said that Mr. Zelensky would come to Washington for meetings on Monday to pave the way for a joint meeting with Mr. Putin. “If all works out, we will then schedule a meeting with President Putin,” Mr. Trump said. “Potentially, millions of people’s lives will be saved.”

 

Mr. Putin’s conditions for such a long-term peace agreement, however, are so expansive that Ukrainian and European leaders are unlikely to go along. Mr. Putin referred to this during his joint appearance with Mr. Trump in Anchorage after their talks, when he spoke about addressing the “root causes” of the war — his term for years of Russian grievances not just about Ukraine but about the United States, NATO and Europe’s security architecture.

 

“We are convinced that in order for the Ukrainian settlement to be sustainable and long-term, all the root causes of the crisis, which have been discussed repeatedly, must be eliminated; all of Russia’s legitimate concerns must be taken into account; and a fair balance in the security sphere in Europe and the world as a whole must be restored,” Mr. Putin said in Alaska.

 

In the past, Mr. Putin has insisted that a comprehensive peace agreement require NATO to pull forces back to its pre-expansion 1997 borders, bar Ukraine from joining the alliance and require Kyiv to not only give up territory in the east but shrink its military. In effect, Mr. Putin aims to reestablish Moscow’s sphere of influence not only in former Soviet territory but to some extent further in Eastern Europe.

 

President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Zelensky and European leaders rejected similar demands on the eve of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. But Mr. Trump appears willing to engage in such a discussion, and since his Friday meeting with Mr. Putin, he has sought to shift the burden for reaching an agreement to Ukraine and Europe.

 

Mr. Trump has long expressed admiration for Mr. Putin and sympathy for his positions. At their most memorable meeting, held in Helsinki in 2018, Mr. Trump famously accepted Mr. Putin’s denial that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election, taking the former K.G.B. officer’s word over the conclusions of American intelligence agencies.

 

Much like then, the president’s chummy gathering in Alaska on Friday with Mr. Putin, who is now under U.S. sanctions and faces an international arrest warrant for war crimes, has generated ferocious blowback. Some critics compared it to the 1938 conference in Munich, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of Britain surrendered part of Czechoslovakia to Germany’s Adolf Hitler as part of a policy of appeasement.

 

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, once considered the Trump of London, called the Alaska summit meeting “just about the most vomit-inducing episode in all the tawdry history of international diplomacy.”

 

But Mr. Zelensky and European leaders sought to make the best of the situation. Some were heartened by Mr. Trump’s comments on the way to Alaska suggesting a willingness to have the United States join Europe in offering some sort of security assurance to Ukraine short of NATO membership. He broached that again in his call with them following the meeting.

 

“We support President Trump’s proposal for a trilateral meeting between Ukraine, the U.S.A. and Russia,” Mr. Zelensky said on Saturday. “Ukraine emphasizes that key issues can be discussed at the level of leaders, and a trilateral format is suitable for this.”

 

Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain praised the American president. “President Trump’s efforts have brought us closer than ever before to ending Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine,” he said in a statement. “His leadership in pursuit of an end to the killing should be commended.”

 

What remains unknown is whether Mr. Trump secured any unannounced concessions from Mr. Putin behind the scenes that would ease the way to a peace agreement in the days to come. Mr. Trump talked about “agreement” on a number of unspecified points, and Mr. Putin referred cryptically to an “understanding” between the two of them.

 

At the moment, however, it does not look like Mr. Putin has made any move toward compromise, even as Mr. Trump has now given up on his bid for an immediate cease-fire. Before the Alaska summit, Russian forces were pounding Ukraine as part of their relentless yearslong assault. And for now, at least, they will continue.

 

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He is covering his sixth presidency and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework.